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Things are collapsing in the final volume of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, in this volume especially, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are weakening and collapsing."

Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey

Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in beast form; where the skies are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, buses are caught and drinks is consumed, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and persistent protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to broaden the religion's rule. A key character, who saved infant the heroine to safety along a swollen river as an child in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which appears mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance rippling out from the region. The oil is seen by various factions as a marketable good, by others as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.

Like the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the destiny of the universe

In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In the conclusion, they come together. Similar to the original series, Lyra's actions and her path are shown to be inextricably woven with the future of the universe. Her private journey to reconnect with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the primary battleground in a wider war with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems always have, is striving to quell freedom of reason, creativity and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.

Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles

The novel opens with the finding of a set of strange fissures in the structure of the world's air: windows that seem to give on to other worlds. An example of a portal manifests to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, designates these openings as a threat to the religion's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from strict logic and back to instinct, however, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously vital – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical struggle between purity and experience is set.

Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth

At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the